State high court OKs termination lawsuit

GENE JOHNSON; The Associated Press

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Ramona Danny missed some work, but she had very good reasons: taking her son to a hospital after her husband beat him, getting herself and her children into a battered women’s shelter, starting divorce proceedings and helping police send her husband to prison.

But when she returned from her two-week leave in 2003, she was demoted. And after she complained about her demotion to the Seattle Human Rights Commission, she was fired.

The Washington Supreme Court on Friday cleared the way for Danny’s lawsuit against her former employer, Laidlaw Transit Services Inc., when it found in a close decision that an employee shouldn’t risk losing a job for taking “an absolutely necessary morning off work to get a protection order, to give a statement to police, or to move her children out of imminent harm’s way.”

A woman who felt she was wrongly fired for missing work to protect her family from abuse can sue, the state Supreme Court says.

The decision in Olympia allows Danny’s case to proceed in federal court in Seattle, but its broader effect is made somewhat moot by a bill Gov. Chris Gregoire signed into law in April. Largely in response to Danny’s case, the Legislature passed a measure this year requiring employers to provide reasonable time off for workers who must deal with the effects of domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking.

Still, the ruling was hailed by activists, including the Northwest Women’s Law Center, which represents Danny.

All the work the state has done to combat domestic violence is rendered meaningless “if a woman like Ms. Danny has to put her job at risk in order to protect herself and her children,” said Lisa Stone, the law center’s executive director.

Danny, 41, worked for about seven years at Laidlaw, which provided certain transit services in King County, and she was eventually promoted to scheduling manager. But in 2003, her home situation deteriorated, with her husband beating her 13-year-old son so badly he was hospitalized. Though it was a busy time for the company, she took two weeks off – with approval from her boss – to deal with the situation.

She was demoted after she returned – without explanation, she said – and two months after that, in December, she was fired.

The law firm that represented Laidlaw did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

To prove her claim of wrongful termination in violation of public policy, Danny first has to prove that a public policy existed that covered her case. U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik asked the state Supreme Court to weigh in on that more than two years ago: Does Washington have a clear public policy forbidding employers from firing an employee who takes time off to protect her family from domestic violence or to hold her abuser accountable?

The question prompted a lot of wrangling from the justices. Three signed the lead opinion, two signed a concurrence, two signed a partial dissent and two signed a total dissent.

In the lead opinion, Justice Susan Owens said that for purposes of the legal analysis, the question should be framed a little differently: Does Washington have a public policy of supporting domestic violence survivors and holding abusers accountable? If so, she said, Danny should have a chance to prove that the actions she took by missing work would further that goal.

But Justice James Johnson found it ludicrous to rephrase Lasnik’s question.

“Of course Washington has a clear policy protecting domestic violence abuse victims and punishing their abusers,” he wrote in dissent. “The question actually presented is much narrower: whether we have a clear policy forbidding employers from firing employees for missing work due to domestic violence.”